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Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results (theverge.com) 243

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform's habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump -- a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results. As Mediaite's Dan Abrams first reported, when you search "final election numbers" or "final vote count 2016," the first result in Google's "in the news" box is from a scrappy-looking Wordpress blog called 70 News that appears to be run by one person. The article, posted on November 12th, features the headline "FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES ( 306-232)HEY CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!" First, the numbers in this post are inaccurate. Though millions of votes have yet to be counted, but Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin. Current counts have her ahead by around 668,000 total votes, with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead. Second, the writer of the 70 News post claims that the source material for the article is "Twitter posts," specifically, this tweet from a user named Michael. Michael, on the other hand, is sourcing an article from the ultra-conservative tabloid USA Supreme, which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots. (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity.) And yet Michael -- by way of 70 News, by way of Google -- has become the sole source for a story squatting at the top of Google's search results. 70 News has since updated its post with a single line admitting that CNN is showing different numbers -- the headline and the body of the post remains the same.
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Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results

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  • From the summary:

    which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots.

    If it really works that way (and I could not find information to prove or disprove that theory), they might have a point.

    And suspicion is reinforced by their (The Verge) obvious attempt to discredit the messenger by noting (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States). And that attempt to ridicule is totally unnecessary.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Why does it matter - that's just a pissing contest. The actual election is held in the Electoral College, which has built-in checks and balances.

      States get 1 Elector for each Representative. That number is directly related to the state's population and the number of associated Electors will very closely match the popular vote. Each state also gets 1 Elector per Senator. That number is equal for all states.

      Consequently, the result of the Electoral College vote is a balance between the popular vote, and the
      • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:00PM (#53284853) Journal

        Those claiming it's somehow unfair for the winner of the popular vote to not be the winner in the Electoral College are either ignorant, or ignoring that the system is working exactly as intended

        Or, they are correctly noting that the Electoral College system is unfair. Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.

        • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:31PM (#53285109)

          Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.

          Furthermore, there's no evidence that the system is "working exactly as intended." I've pointed this out numerous times in the last week, but the Electoral College basically NEVER worked as intended by the Founders. They created this system to deal with a collection of 13 individual states and no major political parties. The Electoral College was created because the assumption was that most voters would vote for a candidate from their home state, leading to a slate of a bunch of random candidates, no one with more than 10-20% of the vote. Aside from any qualms some of the Founders may have had about direct democratic votes in general, getting only 10-20% of the vote would not have resulted in an adequate "mandate" to govern.

          Hence the Electoral College, where electors were required to vote for two people, one of whom had to be NOT from their home state. The idea being that the "native son" from the home state would get one vote, and the other would be for someone with regional consensus. The top 5 such candidates would float to the top, and Congress would make the final selection.

          Within 12 years, that system failed due to the emergence of political parties, since that system didn't differentiate vote for President or VP (the most votes just became President, and the runner-up became VP). Hence the 12th amendment, which separated the votes for VP.

          And yet still the Electoral College did not function as originally imaged by the Founders, since they imagined a group of educated folks with essentially free choice to elect the best person in their own view. Instead, more and more states started moving toward a "general ticket" structure where you'd just have a slate of partisan Electors who were designated to vote for their party candidate. By the 1830s, that was pretty much the norm everywhere.

          So no, the system is NOT working as intended, and never really has. It was an idealistic and abstract system constructed before anyone had a clue what the electoral landscape of the new nation would look like -- and it basically became irrelevant (and redundant) the moment political parties emerged.

          • by msauve ( 701917 )
            Please explain, in your view, why Electors were given for Senators, and not just Representatives. Also why, if there should be no winner of a majority in the Electoral College, each state receives an equal (i.e. one) vote in the House "run-off" election.
            • by swalve ( 1980968 )
              Back in the day, the US was more of a federation of states rather than a single nation. Quite like the EU is now. Each state was a quasi-nation of its own, and the federal government was intended to just sort of administrate that federation. So, the president was voted on by the states, not by the people, because he had basically nothing to do with the wants and needs of the people. He was just a designated treaty signer and funeral-goer. Just as with the congress and senate, the quantity of electors w
              • by msauve ( 701917 )
                That's all an argument for reducing powers the federal government has usurped (Commerce Clause abuse), and giving them back to the states. Let there be diversity between the states, instead of a federal government which forces them all to be (essentially) the same.

                And really, you claim "cohesive nation?" Haven't you been paying attention to current events?
          • Just because the Founding Fathers designed the system in some way, doesn't per se mean that it is a good system; even if they were entirely flawless as individuals, they still had to try to make democracy work in a situation where long distance communication, not to mention computing power, were painfully slow, if I'm not mistaken. So they came up with the best they could with what was at hand, but it seems obvious that now, when we have the ability to communicate almost instantly across continents and are

        • If the Electoral College went away, I'd have to actually vote for a major party candidate when I dislike both. Here in Illinois the Democrats always take the Presidential vote. So, my protest vote would be a throwaway if direct election of the President occurred.
          • How on earth did you come to *that* conclusion?

            The point is your vote for whoever is tallied up with all the other votes from throughout the country. Being in an always-Democrat state becomes meaningless, because the votes aren't split state by state.

        • What is "fair"? I suspect the answer depends on who you ask.

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        I guess I have a couple of counter arguments:

        1) Congressional delegations aren't winner-take-all. Many states have split congressional delegations, why not split electoral votes? There are several schemes for this which seem to address the principal problem of population skew to a handful of states and cause the electoral college system to better represent the popular vote without totally abandoning the electoral college system.

        2) The funny math of electoral votes skews the political process towards a ha

        • by msauve ( 701917 )
          The answer to 1 and 3 is that there is no Constitutional requirement for a vote. The method of choosing Electors is up to the states. If a state wanted to have their legislature, or their Congressmen, or their Governor choose the Electors, they could.

          The answer to 2 is that not all states are winner takes all. A couple vote by congressional district, with the 2 "Senate" electors going to the overall winner. But again, that's entirely up to the states, and there's no need for a change at the Federal level n
    • I'd read that historically, absentee ballots tend to run something like 67% republican, 33% democrat. Or was it 63% - 37%? Anyway, they're roughly 2/3 republican since so many are military, plus overseas businessmen on trips. A sizeable chunk also comprises exchange students, likely to be mostly democrat votes. Considering that absentee ballots are not normally counted unless they number greater than the margin of difference between candidates in a state, that could still represent a very large number
    • by DRJlaw ( 946416 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:05PM (#53284909)

      If it really works that way (and I could not find information to prove or disprove that theory), they might have a point.

      But it doesn't really work that way, and if you applied even an iota of critical thinking, you'd realize why it can't.

      Did you vote on Tuesday? Did your ballot really only have a single multiple choice item for President of the United States? Because mine didn't. My had president, senator, representative, state senator, state representative, city council member, state supreme court justice (multiple), municipal court justice (multiple), family court justice (one or two), and multiple local millages.

      My wife's absentee ballot, being that she lives with me and all, was identical. Which means that whether Trump defeated HRC by several hundred thousand votes or a few hundred, there were many other races where her vote was relevant to the outcome, and the presidential election was not the end-all-be-all of whether all those little bubbles would be scanned by the county's equipment.

      Your inability to find governmental information concerning this myth is as ridiculous as this Michael nonsense. [fvap.gov]

      "The media often will report the projected outcome of the election before all of the ballots are counted. In a close election, the media may report that the outcome cannot be announced until after the absentee ballots are counted. However, all ballots, including absentee ballots, are counted in the final totals for every election - and every vote (absentee or in-person) counts the same."

      The ability to project a winner in a top-of-ballot race does not eliminate the need to count absentee ballots in all other races.

      And suspicion is reinforced by their (The Verge) obvious attempt to discredit the messenger by noting (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States).

      Tell you what, why don't you actually telephone your county board of elections as ask them yourself rather than settling for discrediting the messenger only when it suits you.

      • I read your [DRJlaw's] comment several times trying to figure out why it was rated as insightful. I'd be glad if you can clarify your insight, but I can't decide if it was obscured by your confrontational inline style or it's just another bad mod on today's Slashdot. (Yes, it could be fixed, but I've already wasted too many keystrokes pointing out obvious approaches.)

        I do want to seek some insight, but first I want to clarify some possible problems with your Reply. Most importantly, my own ballot only had t

        • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          Most importantly, my own ballot only had two races on it.

          Provably wrong. [state.tx.us] Name your county, and we can even look it up for you.

          Some years ago, it was actually reported that the election boards in Texas did NOT count the absentee ballots unless there were enough of them to potentially change the outcome of some race. Of course, in those days there were far fewer absentee ballots...

          Well then, that reporting was wrong as well [state.tx.us].

          Sec. 87.1231. EARLY VOTING VOTES REPORTED BY PRECINCT. Not
          later than the time of the

          • by shanen ( 462549 )

            I do not appreciate being called a liar. I saw the ballot. I filled in the ballot and mailed it.

            Or do you somehow think the third option on my ballot, the option of voting the straight party ticket, should be counted as a third race?

            I suppose we could have discussed the matter further. If you had asked politely I would have even explained the details that apparently aren't obvious to you. Instead, you started out by calling my veracity into question.

            Ergo, I've decided to mark this so-called discussion as po

            • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

              I do not appreciate being called a liar. I saw the ballot. I filled in the ballot and mailed it.

              I did not call you a liar. I said that you were wrong. Name your county in Texas as we can see exactly which state and local races your ballot included. Or don't -- anyone selecting multiple counties on that site can identify the state-wide races that were on your ballot for themselves.

              • by shanen ( 462549 )

                Is that supposed to be one of those fake apologies? Or just evidence of narrow-minded American thinking of the sort that elected Trump?

                I am not wrong, and you are a liar to say you are not making that accusation. I simply chose the stronger word because of your rudeness.

                There is a VERY thin basis for continuing this discussion. First, you need to acknowledge that you don't know something. Then you need to ask POLITELY for the missing data.

                An apology would be nice, too, but I don't think you're big enough fo

      • by sabri ( 584428 )

        But it doesn't really work that way, and if you applied even an iota of critical thinking, you'd realize why it can't.

        It can most certainly work that way. If States indeed choose to count absentee ballots when they can only make a difference in the outcome, that would make some economical sense.

        Did you vote on Tuesday?

        I did not. I'll have to wait until next time, after naturalization.

        • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          It can most certainly work that way. If States indeed choose to count absentee ballots when they can only make a difference in the outcome, that would make some economical sense.

          No, it cannot, because the ballots cover multiple races at each of the national, state, and local levels. Also, various laws are based on percentage thresholds of all persons who, for example, voted for governor in a state (referendum petition signature requirements, for example). Finally, they do not. EVER.

          Name your state, and I

    • From the summary:

      which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots.

      Did you actually look at the website where this came from? It doesn't exactly project an aura of credibility.

      If it really works that way (and I could not find information to prove or disprove that theory), they might have a point.

      Yes indeed, he (Michael) might. But until some more credible source reports on this story, I'm quite comfortable with ignoring it.

      And suspicion is reinforced by their (The Verge) obvious attempt to discredit the messenger by noting (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States). And that attempt to ridicule is totally unnecessary.

      That's not The Verge. That's Michael's own tweet, per TFS. Michael is discrediting himself. The Verge is just reporting what he has done.

  • What is an expert? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dontbemad ( 2683011 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @04:37PM (#53284657)

    ...with some polling experts projecting...

    Honestly, after this election, I'm surprised anyone takes that phrase seriously.

    • My thoughts were "Speaking of fake news!"
      How is "Some polling experts think it will grow to be around 2Million" real news but equally random and badly sourced site saying Trump will take the popular vote fake news?
  • TFA closes with:

    We are entering a zone where even the hardest of facts become debatableâ in the minds of conspiracy theorists. But Google, you are effectively a computer program with none of that supposed media bias, so Google programmers please do what you can to stop helping them spread lies. It only enhances our increasing distrust in all forms of media. Most important, itâ(TM)s really, really bad for the truth and for America.

    While I agree that we seem to be entering into a "post-fact" era, I'm not sure that Google has ever tweaked their algorithm to emphasize TRUTH. Popularity, maybe. Relevance to a particular search term, sure. Number of 3rd-party links to a page, definitely.

    But "truth" or "fact"? There has always been crap on the internet, and if this is the first time this person noticed a top hit linking to BS, this person must not spend a lot of time doing internet searches. Not saying I don't wish t

  • And very obviously so. I don't know how anyone with half a brain would mistake it for a reputable news site.
    • by slew ( 2918 )

      And very obviously so. I don't know how anyone with half a brain would mistake it for a reputable news site.

      Which goes to show that a page ranking system based on counting the quality and links a site has doesn't mean it is anything other than that.

      If you want pages ranked for some other criteria, you have to design for it. Given many people seek out views that confirm their own views of the world, there's no reason to doubt that the material on this site was "authoritative" (given some definitions of that word), to many of the people that searched for that information.

      Authoritative doesn't necessarily mean accur

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Shouldn't news websites require digitally signed press credentials of some sort?
    Then the news search engines could simply *ignore* any noncredentialled publishers--or at least classify them correctly as opinion sites.

  • Google is just surfacing information that apparently a lot of people have referenced. To me the search results seem incredibly valid AS SEARCH RESULTS, even if the information contained on the page is not...

    Google should not be any kind of gatekeeper to accuracy of what it links to, it should just try and produce the most relevant results - if a lot of people are refereeing and talking about that post, it then should be one of the top search results.

  • TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES

    That's bullshit. They are getting that be subtracting out the 3,000,000 million illegal non-citizen "immigrant" votes for Hillary. OK, they are not subtracting out all of the vote flipping from the Soros controlled voting machines because they don't know how extensive it was and they are having trouble subtracting out all the dead vote and the ballot stuffing and other proud Democrat traditional voting techniques, but they are still

  • I saw it on the INTERNET! It is absolutely true!

    Gullible people from all sides swallow their own brand of KoolAid every day off the internet. What has the world come to?

    Ah, well, that pesky 1st amendment be damned, there should be a law!!

    Sarc Off

  • You won't see any imaginary vote tallies on my authoritative site. If you see that Hillary got 60e6+5e5j votes...you know it's a fake. Real election results will be certified by the states and reported on their elections departments' websites and in established newspapers of record. That's where you get numbers that matter. Not from the first thing that pops out of Google.

    If we wrote code the way some people get their news, it'd all be a sea of javascript snippets and interdependencies that would break at
  • First of all, Google Search is a search engine. Search engines were not designed to evaluate the veracity of content. They simply find other websites with content relevant to your search terms.

    This is the Internet and it has always been incumbent upon Internet users to exercise discretion with regard to the quality of content that can be discovered. How is this confusing?

    Secondly, removing USA Supreme as the number one search result would only replace one bias with another. CNN can publish slanted

  • by DidgetMaster ( 2739009 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:37PM (#53285171) Homepage
    '...with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead.' Are these the same polling experts that predicted that Clinton would comfortably win the election? No matter what the final tally will be, the popular vote winner will probably win by less than 1%. Not exactly a 'sizable lead' in my book. The EC vote tally however, gave a sizable lead to the election victor.
  • Seriously people (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:45PM (#53285237)

    Can we please move on already?

    Why do we need to keep rehashing this? Trump won. I voted for Hillary and she didn't win. BFD, it happens. Move on....

    Let's give the guy a chance instead of getting all worked up over it. Maybe he will be the best POTUS ever (doubt it, but you just never know).

    At the very least, we have no more excuses for not getting stuff done. It is all under republican control now so there should be no more gridlock, we can actually see a government in action for once. Bring it republicans, show us what you got. Fix all the problems! No more excuses!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      Maybe he will be the best POTUS ever

      He'll have to work very hard to be worse than the last two.

    • Be careful. the last time we had Uniparty Government we got Obamacare, the start of the Libyan troubles, and $1 trillion of stimulus funds spent on nothing...
    • Accepting an outcome in a system that every few years is deemed broken results in a system that is never fixed.

      Trump i will be president, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have the discussion as to whether the system should be changed to improve for next time.

  • This can be fixed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @06:10PM (#53285417)

    Believe it or not, fake news can be filtered out... if the majority of reports are correct or if the report is from a trustworthy source. You have to make associations with initial results and compare all the overlapping associations overlap. The more times a site is correct, the more weight you give to it's reporting and vice-versa. Basically, you have to make IBM's Watson.

  • Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results

    Google does what?

    Since when has "surface" meant... well, whatever this means?

  • "Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity."

    This is your story? Do people also seriously believe in the flying spaghetti monster?

    Liberals are really digging deep for their Gulf of Tonkin to establish their Ministry of Information to "protect" us from contrary information.

    First they came for Pepe the Frog...

  • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday November 14, 2016 @06:31PM (#53285545)

    While saying Trump won the popular vote appears to be fale, you can hardly call a 668,000 vote lead "sizable" when the total turn out was somewhere around 130 million. She barely edged him out.

    • Re: Sizable lead? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While saying Trump won the popular vote appears to be fale, you can hardly call a 668,000 vote lead "sizable" when the total turn out was somewhere around 130 million. She barely edged him out.

      /

      That's the population of Wyoming. Vermont. Getting close to the Dakota's and Alaska. It is more than the margin of victory in many states. I am entirely comfortable calling that sizable.

      Trump will have to face that. In fact, I suggest every Democrat make a point to remind him of his failure to get more votes than Hillary from the voters. After all by Trump's own tweets, the electoral college is rigged. Broken. Corrupt. Let us never let him forget it.

  • This is exactly why SEO is a scammy business. Sure nothing 'wrong' was done here, but it is obvious this is not what google intended when they wrote the search/ranking algorithm.
  • What is it with people putting spaces after opening brackets, but not the closing bracket? It looks amateur.

  • Slashdot is guilty of fake news too.

    Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin.

    Fake news detected. The margin is less than .1%, and quite less than the margin for error.

  • Current estimates say roughly 3mln non-citizens voted Clinton. That would mean invalid/illegal votes, and versus 660,000 votes of lead, would mean she did NOT win the popular vote.

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